I am genuinely curious about the thought process behind any woman who is serious about dating women but who actively decides to hide her sexual orientation from her profile.

You know, it's sad and frustrating but I was reading a few posts by bisexual women about online dating (trying to get any WLW perspective I can here) and they were disheartened because they thought that they weren't getting matches because some lesbian women don't want to date bisexual women. And then the people in the comments were like: "Don't tag yourself as bisexual, tag yourself as queer! That'll avoid the problem!" Like... 1) you shouldn't have to hide the fact that you're bisexual 2) those lesbian women would still leave once they eventually find out you're bisexual anyway... there is no winning with them.

Yes and no. It's heavily geared toward....

Gotcha, that all makes sense, thanks.

No, but I have a loooot of thoughts on this. The details are probably better to discuss via dm.

Will hit you up :)

I don’t force any discussions and I make sure to carefully establish that my background is in Western liberal values before I get anywhere near a touchy subject.

Yup, I've come to take that approach, too.

And when I touch a contentious subject, I keep my statements as personal and close to me as possible, which makes them less subject to attack and more easily defensible. I talk about my experiences. My feelings. How I experience attraction. How I knew I was a lesbian.

Ahhhh, now that's a good approach. What I love about that, too, is that in a way this strategy takes advantage of a weakness of Queer Theory (specifically, a weakness that comes from its postmodernist heritage): "Always question the institution, never question the individual." Even someone drinking the koolaid of gender identity would likely adhere to that Queer Theory social norm and use kiddie gloves when disagreeing with you.

It's funny, I hear you describing these tactics and they're all quite sound, and some of them are things that I also do that I wouldn't even think to describe unless someone asked me. Having some of these types of tactics described explicitly in a guide or something would be an invaluable resource, I think; it would likely generalize well to situations with friends, too, not just dating.

I don’t think I can put a number to this within this framework. For a number of reasons, I mostly sort through who has already liked me.

I'll have to see whether or not the same strategy is available to me at all, hahaha. I'm sure you do just fine. :)

I would say that there are enough lesbian and bi women who do not overtly sip the koolaid within my likes that they are not unicorns and I haven’t needed to venture out beyond them.

Really glad to hear that, both for your sake and in general. But, I'm keenly curious to see how that will play out with my being in Gen Z.

I actually don’t see that many women list “Bisexual” though, and on an app like Hinge, I interpret women who select “Bisexual” as serious candidates. I see more women whose profiles say “Lesbian” than “Bisexual.”

Really... that's so fascinating. I guess plain ol' bisexual is just considered "boring," now. Man, TRAs really do have a fast turnover rate on the demographic groups that they colonize.